The challenge The process for taking card payments involved navigating to a customer’s Council Tax account in the Capita Revenues system to check the account details and then logging into the Payment Portal. Account details held within Capita Revenues then had to be manually re-keyed into the Payment Portal. Suffolk Coastal District Council estimated that it took approximately two minutes to take a card Payment. The integration between the Payment Portal and Capita Revenues would halve the time taken. The authority calculated that they would save 110 hours - equivalent to three weeks of staff time. The Solution The solution was to implement Capita Payment Management’s Direct Payment module. This provides an e-Pay button on the Capita Revenues desktop. To take a payment the user simply enters the amount the customer wishes to pay. Payment Portal is then launched with the customer’s details having been pre-populated from the Revenues system. Once the payment has been taken, an authorisation code is securely passed back to the Revenues system and the account balance is updated accordingly.